The peak of calls from Russians who are looking for housing on real estate sites falls on September, October and November, and the highest conversion of site visits to calls occurred in October (+ 13%) in 2020 when compared to January. This is stated in the study of the Calltouch service, the results of which were received by Izvestia on Wednesday, March 24.
The service analyzed traffic on four classes of real estate sites: economy, comfort, business and premium. The data of more than 3.7 million applications were studied in the period from January to December last year in Moscow and the Moscow region. The study only looked at real estate sites that had used Calltouch over the past year.
The study was conducted to provide developers with data to evaluate the effectiveness of their own ad placement and improve the quality of lead generation.
So, the period of “lull” fell in April, May and June 2020. The study authors suggested that this could be due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and the introduction of mandatory compliance with home regimes, when people put off expensive purchases until a later date.
Most of the users entered real estate sites from a mobile phone – 52.2%, and from a computer – 38.4%.
Most often, calls came from a mobile phone, but the computer wins in the premium segment – 48% versus 45.9%. The bulk of unique calls to real estate sales departments were made on weekdays from 10:00 to 18:00. There are much fewer phone calls on weekends.
Most often men call directly to sales offices, and women use the callback function. The share of direct calls is much higher – 83.6%, than return calls – 16.4%.
Most of the unique hits to the site are generated by paid traffic – 46.4%. The share of search through classifications (message boards on the Internet) is 17.4%, and organic search gives 15.2%. 7.6% of users turn to sales centers directly, and 7.1% via social networks. A small share is made up of geo-services – 2.4%, referral traffic – 1.9% and mailings – 1.2%.
Among the classifieds, CIAN was mainly used – 31.1%. Facebook (with Instagram) was in the lead among social networks – 82.7%.
When comparing search engines “Yandex” and Google, the first one showed higher efficiency in terms of the number of calls through organic search, paid traffic and geo-services. The share of display ads in paid traffic was 3.7%. The cost of a call from the context of Yandex.Direct and Google Ads is approximately equal. The biggest difference is in the premium segment. Thus, a lead in Yandex.Direct costs 12,085 rubles, and in Google Ads – 11,187 rubles.
In December 2020, a report from the Cyan analytical center said that the average daily rental rate during the period of self-isolation in cities with a population of over one million in Russia fell by 17%. In December 2019, on average, it was possible to rent an apartment for 2.48 thousand rubles, and in April-May 2020 – for 2.07 thousand.In December, such apartments were rented for an average of 2.2 thousand rubles, which is 11% lower than in December 2019.